The moonwalk thing completely illustrates a point about racism.
The wife understood, immediately and without anyone having to give her a workshop, without her having to hear ten podcasts about it, without someone winning an Oscar in a movie about the subject, without it being in a MLK speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
She understood that a white guy suspected of racist behavior doing the moonwalk in front of reporters would be big-T Trouble.
She understood it without having to give an interview of her husband to find out his deepest intent.
She understood the context she was in was completely wrong for it, even when doing the moonwalk is completely innocuous in other contexts. She understood this live, in real-time.
And you can contrast this immediate live understanding with every person who theorizes that it’s impossible to know when it’s racist to wear a KKK hood, or use the N-word.
As soon as people understand that being racist has some immediate personal consequence, then miraculously they understand all of it: context, social subtext, nuance, historical symbolism…
If they feel they can say things with no challenge to themselves, then those concepts immediately become debatable or ungraspable.
The reason people get caught with blackface photos isn’t because they didn’t know it was wrong, it’s because they felt it didn’t matter to anyone that could hurt them in any way.
